Historically, VAT has never been charged on food, childrens clothes or domestic fuel. They’re not luxuries, they’re essential items and should therefore be VAT free.
Then the European Federation demands that VAT be introduced on domestic fuel – coal, gas, electricity, fuel oil – and the British government conceded. It started of at a couple of percent and now it’s about 7% or somewhere in that region.
The latest plan is for VAT on food but, to make it more palatable (excuse the pun) it is only to be introduced on unhealthy foods. A morbidly obese MEP of John Prescott proportions was in the news yesterday because he told the EU that it needed to legislate to stop people from eating unhealthy food and getting fat. Hypocrite.
Anyway, the British government has decided that very shortly, unhealthy foods as decided by “experts” will carry VAT. Hopefully these aren’t the same “experts” that last week were horrified that a sandwich from Pret á Manger contained one third of the daily recommended allowance of salt. Imagine – one of your three meals a day containing one third of your daily allowance – how do they get away with it?
So, these health nazi’s “experts” will decide what food is unhealthy and the British government will charge VAT on them. The VAT will be paid to the Treasury and forwarded on to the EU … what, you didn’t know that the Treasury’s VAT receipts are forwarded on to the EU? Gosh, I wonder why nobody ever told you.
This is a very dangerous precedent to set. Food is one of the few zero-rated VAT items that we have and the EU is very keen to abolish all zero-rated VAT items. It might start with a small rate of VAT (the estimated cost is 70p per person per week) on unhealthy food but once the cash comes rolling in it’ll spread and if the “experts” are horrified when one third of our daily meals contains on third of our salt allowance, everything barring nut loaf and lentil soup (the staple diet of the “experts”) will end up carrying the full 17.5% VAT rate before long.
BEUrocrat: Emporer Barroso, the people cannot afford to buy bread.
Barroso: Let them eat rice cake.
History has a habit of repeating itself …
I remember vat of two and a half percent being added to the then current rate of fifteen percent to pay for education surely all VAT does not go to the E.U.EMPIRE
No, it was an exaggeration. I worked out that in 2004 they got a billion or so of VAT receipts collected by the Treasury but with the VAT rate going up on domestic fuel and being applied to more items and with the price increases in domestic fuel and commodities in the last 3 years, it’ll bit a fair bit higher than that now. It’s a sizeable percentage of our budget contribution.
(When I say I worked it out, I meant tonight, not when I wrote the post otherwise I’d have said that yesterday!)
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Thanks.
“the British government has decided that very shortly, unhealthy foods as decided by “experts” will carry VAT”. No, it hasn’t. Some doctors suggested, in an article in the British Medical Journal, that the health of the nation could be improved if VAT were levied on certain unhealthy foods. And sorry, but it’s nothing to do with the EU. Once again, this unchecked inaccuracy is the sort of thing that earns blogging its bad name.